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Republican attorney general candidate David Freed renewed a promise Wednesday to review the office's handling of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse case, but said he won't judge its performance until he can see the entire case file.

"Any responsible prosecutor after a case of that nature ends is going to look back to see what could have been done better, what could have been done differently," Mr. Freed told The Times-Tribune editorial board. "I think we're in agreement on that. I think my review may be a little different than what my opponent is suggesting."

Kathleen Granahan Kane, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, has suggested Gov. Tom Corbett, while attorney general, "probably" played politics with the case by delaying its prosecution because of hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from officials of the Second Mile, the charity co-founded by Mr. Sandusky whose mission was to aid disadvantaged boys.

Mr. Sandusky was the longtime defensive coordinator for the football team at Penn State University.

Mr. Corbett has denied playing politics and, through a spokesman, accused Mrs. Kane of doing that with the issue. Mrs. Kane has repeatedly said she saw no reason to take the Sandusky case before a grand jury and let it drag on for three years.

"I've said over and over again that until I see all the reports, the grand jury testimony, talk to the people involved in the case, I can't make a judgment," said Mr. Freed, a Camp Hill resident who is the Cumberland County district attorney. "I've also said that, in my experience, it's the prosecutor handling the case who knows when the best time is to go forward with the case. There's a big difference between us."

Mr. Freed suggested he might have acted similarly to the way the case was prosecuted.

"In a case with a high-profile defendant, lack of physical evidence, delayed reporting, in my experience (a) grand jury is the way to go," he said. "And what the attorney general did was build a case based on corroboration. When I read the (grand jury) presentment, what jumped out at me was ... the corroboration between and among the stories that they told and the work that had to be done to get them in to testify."

Ten testified

Ten victims of Mr. Sandusky testified at his trial. In June, a jury found him guilty on 45 of 48 counts related to the abuse.

Mr. Freed said he would never make a hard-and-fast rule not to use a grand jury in a child sex abuse case.

"Sometimes, it's necessary for the case," he said. "(The) easy thing for a prosecutor to do is charge. The hard thing to do is to say, 'No, we're not ready, we don't have the evidence yet.' "

Mr. Freed said "the public is understandably upset" that Mr. Sandusky got away with abusing children for so long.

"I think it's always important to remember that we elect prosecutors to do a job," he said. "We rely on prosecutors' judgment. Until I have all those facts, I'm not going to make statements about the judgment that was executed."

Mr. Freed, who has been district attorney since 2006, said he deserves to be elected because of his experience and qualifications.

The main difference between him and Mrs. Kane, he said, is his experience at running an office.

Mr. Freed said he favors removing statutes of limitations on sex abuse cases and would hire a victim advocate for the office, lead the fight against bath salts and other synthetic drugs and upgrade the office's technological capabilities. He promised a "soup-to-nuts review of the office to make sure we're doing things as efficiently as we could possibly do."

Technology changes

"The job of a prosecutor is different from how it was 10, 15, 20 years ago - the use of technology and how nimble we have to be, how we have to meet our lack of resources," he said. "Now more than ever, the attorney general needs to be the leader of law enforcement in the state, not a competitor with the DAs, not a competitor with the feds, not a competitor with the state police. ... The criminals, in terms of the use of technology are way ahead of us. The scammers and consumer fraud are way ahead of us in their use of technology. We're only going to be able to fight against that by banding together."

He promised to better publicize the agency's efforts at consumer protection, which he said are significant but not well known. He said he would not sign onto a big nationwide consumer-protection case unless the harm cited in the case hurts Pennsylvania taxpayers.

Mr. Freed said he is also open to discussing regionalization of police forces to improve crime-fighting, but declined to say he is ready to advocate for regionalization.

Contact the writer: bkrawczeniuk@ timesshamrock.com

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